FREE SPEECH ONLY FOR THE "WOKE"

Remember the bloody sock? It became the symbol of the Red Sox World Series championship in 2004 that ended “the curse of the bambino” — an 86-year-long drought following the Babe Ruth trade in 1918. The sock was worn by pitching ace Curt Schilling who’d just had surgery. With a bleeding ankle, he still won the crucial game six of the American League Championship series against the New York Yankees. That put the Sox into the World Series in which Schilling won game two in a four-game sweep of the Cardinals.

Schilling is a hero to New Englanders, but not to the liberal Boston Globe which ran the Sunday headline: “Will Curt Schilling’s inflammatory rhetoric keep him out of the Hall of Fame?” Sports writers cited his conservative politics for their negative votes. Now Schilling’s scalp hangs in the cancel-culture hall of fame. No one can doubt that Schilling is one of the greatest pitchers of all time, but to liberal media his politics are deplorable, especially his support for Donald Trump.

Kati Couric

I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 — and I would again given the same choices. So would tens of millions of other Americans, but our vilification is accelerating. In 2016 Hillary Clinton called half of us “deplorable” and “irredeemable.” However, two weeks ago former mainstream media news anchor Kati Couric suggested we need to be “deprogrammed.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson echoed that saying: “there are millions of Americans, almost all White, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed.”

How would that be done? Gulags?

WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin

Fellow Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin said: “We have to collectively, in essence, burn down the Republican Party” and leave no survivors. She also said we have to blacklist Trump supporters from universities and media. And it’s not just media; Former FBI Director James Comey said: “The Republican party needs to be burned down … It’s just not a healthy political organization.”

James Comey

Does that sound like inciting violence? Just as Cool Hand Luke was warned, you conservatives have to “get your mind right.” I only hope the above-named “progressives” envision only a night in the box and not life in a concentration camp or a bullet in the back of the head. But, then again, WaPo columnist Jennifer Rubin said: “We have to level them, because if there are survivors… they will do it again.”

Leftists in academia control what students learn, but Pew Research said last week that almost all Americans increasingly get their news from their smartphone or tablet, often on platforms like Twitter and Facebook and Google. These are owned and operated by liberals who use their power to censor news like the Hunter Biden laptop story they spiked until after Biden won the election.

Smith College Professor Loretta Ross

For years now our colleges and universities have banned conservatives speakers. Now Smith College Professor Loretta Ross says Trump supporters must be: “treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II.” For Professor Ross, “The term “Nazi” is not even strong enough to convey the opprobrium and disgust human rights activists feel for those who brazenly claim they are simply patriots with different opinions.” It’s hard to believe students pay Smith $75,000 a year to learn this stuff.

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley says: “Many professors admit…they are afraid to speak out… about the rising level of intolerance [for conservatives]… In over 30 years of teaching, I have never witnessed the level of intimidation at colleges and universities that we have today.”

Democrats, and some Republicans, are pushing impeachment of President Trump because of his remarks at the White House on January 6th, which they claim incited a violent takeover of the US Capitol the same day. In a column January 7th, I called on Trump to resign for the same reason, but what is the point of impeaching him after he’s gone? None I can see except spite and fear he might run again.

Now my newspaper column is affected by the leftist cancel culture. My piece last week explaining why I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and listing his accomplishments was spiked in one of the newspapers that has carried it nearly every week for decades. The Conway Daily Sun had no problem running the previous column telling Trump to resign, but the publisher claims he spiked last week’s (and others recently) because of “factual errors.” I responded that he owns the paper and he can print or not print whatever he wants, but scoffed at his pretense of political objectivity. He has agreed to discuss his claims with me face-to-face on my local Valley Vision TV show “Left & Right” February 3rd.

That should be interesting.

DANGEROUS DISTRUST OF ELECTORAL PROCESS

Yes, I did call for President Trump to resign two weeks ago. However, it may surprise readers to know that if I could go back to 2016, I would vote for him again; 2020 too. Despite his behavior since losing reelection, I see his presidency as a net positive. Impeaching him now is farcical given that he’s leaving office anyway but the Dems want to prevent him from ever running again because they’re afraid of him.

Biden brags about getting Ukraine prosecutor fired

This latest impeachment for inciting violence may have grounds, unlike the 2020 effort which charged Trump with asking Ukrainians to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling. Pelosi ignored then-vice-president Biden on videotape threatening to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to Ukraine to stop a Ukrainian investigation into Hunter Biden. Mainstream media allies cooperated on both fronts.

Ever since Trump got the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, mainstream media has amplified every Democrat effort to impugn him. First they magnified the Clinton campaign’s fabricated Steele Dossier and dubious Trump/Russian collusion story. They ignored Obama’s use of intelligence agencies to spy on Trump’s campaign before the 2016 election and then afterward on his transition team. They cheerleaded the dubious Mueller Investigations into General Flynn and President Trump, neither of which found anything to prosecute and only succeeded in bankrupting Flynn, destroying his reputation, and crippling Trump’s presidency.

Conservatives did a slow burn watching all this and 90% negative media coverage of Trump’s presidency despite its long string of successes: Trump isolated Iran and its terrorism. He killed Iran General Soleimani, ISIS founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and al-Qaeda leader Qasim al-Rimi, among others. He forged the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab leaders. He spurred economic growth that Obama claimed would be impossible. He reduced illegal immigration and built over 400 miles of new border wall. He hammered out favorable trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, the EU, and China. He appointed hundreds of pro-life judges and three originalist Supreme Court justices.

He eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate, reformed the VA, withdrew from the Paris Accord and the Iran nuclear agreement, got NATO Countries to pay their fair share, cut restrictions on oil drilling and coal exports, fast-tracked and funded a COVID vaccine, brought unemployment to record lows, raised median household income to record level, brought home troops from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, reformed the criminal justice system, and created the Space Force. Trump may be the most controversial president ever, but he’s also one of the most accomplished, especially considering he did all that in four years.

After losing on November 3rd, however, Trump claimed election fraud. Mainstream media said there was no evidence. Millions of Trump voters however, watched as Trump was winning that evening when swing states abruptly stopped counting votes, sent observers home, and resumed counting. By morning they were reporting that Trump was losing. Pennsylvania extended its deadline for counting votes without constitutional authority, after which the votes swung to Biden.

Is that evidence of election fraud or coincidence? Millions of Trump voters believe it was cheating. Mainstream media denied it all and called the election for Trump. Hundreds of observers made sworn depositions of voter fraud. That is evidence. Only two eyewitnesses, for example, are needed for a murder conviction and sometimes only one, but mainstream media continued claiming there was no evidence. There’s also video of ballot stuffing in Georgia. Law suits alleging fraud were dismissed on procedural grounds like lack of standing. There is plenty of evidence for election fraud largely perpetrated by Democrats, though probably not enough to overturn the result.

Our Founders gave us freedom of speech for many reasons, but one was for irate citizens to blow off steam by expressing their anger verbally and in writing. Here in 2021, people don’t use 18th century broadsheets; they use Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Those outlets are owned and run by leftists who have been censoring news and posts with which they disagree, especially about election fraud. Because they’re private companies, they probably aren’t violating the 1st Amendment, but they’ve assumed enormous political power and they’re using it against conservatives, so far under the legal protection of Section 230.

We now have a huge percentage of our electorate that no longer trusts the electoral process. One could debate whether that mistrust is justified or not, but there’s little dispute that it exists. That is a huge threat to our republic that should give all of us the shivers.

Trump has been accused of narcissism even by supporters. What they at first saw as a character flaw was turning into an unraveling after his election loss, and it accelerated week-to-week. By January 6th it had completely blinded him to the political reality that Biden’s election would not be overturned. His unwillingness to accept that is embarrassing for all who voted for him. I will not vote for him in any 2024 primary and I hope he doesn't get the Republican nomination again. Right now I'm looking at Nikki Haley.

RESIGN, MR. TRUMP

Seth Lipsky, editor and publisher of the New York Sun, had the best response to what President Trump did yesterday: he should resign and turn the office over to Vice President Mike Pence for the remainder of his term. That presupposes there’s any honor in Mr. Trump to salvage. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe there never was. It would be a mea culpa and would require humility as well as honor. Never have I observed any semblance of humility in him, but perhaps he could summon some as his final presidential action.

Lipsky twice endorsed Mr. Trump for president, in 2016 and again in 2020, and said it was heartbreaking to write that editorial. As I echo his recommendation however, I do not feel any heartache. I voted twice for Trump, but without enthusiasm. I couldn’t vote for Hillary or Biden so I voted against each of them, and that meant voting for Trump. Never did I feel any affection for him. He simply didn’t engender that.

Weeks before Wednesday’s events I was appalled at what Trump said when he encouraged his followers to come to the Capitol and protest the election on January 6th. “Be there, will be wild,” he said. He claimed a report by his assistant would be “more than sufficient” to swing the election over to him. He didn’t seem to realize how volatile divisions in America had become, or if he did realize it, he didn’t care enough. He couldn’t or wouldn’t see beyond himself, so pervasive was his narcissism.

Hundreds of thousands came. Crowd estimates vary, but perhaps as many as 500,000, and Trump spoke to them for over an hour about (real? alleged? imagined?) election abuses before they marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol.

Early on, he started firing them up.

At 02:44 he said: “We have hundreds of thousands of people here, and I just want them to be recognized by the fake news media. Turn your cameras please and show what’s really happening out here because these people are not going to take it any longer. They’re not going to take it any longer.”

At 06:08 he said: “We will not let them silence your voices. We’re not going to let it happen. Not going to let it happen.” 

At 07:11 the crowd began chanting: “Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!”

At 16:25 he said: “After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you.”

But Trump didn’t go there with him. He stayed behind in the White House. If he had, perhaps he could have prevented what happened.

He continued, saying: “We’re going to walk down… [incoherent] …We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

At 23:21 he referred to Tuesday’s’ Georgia election defeats saying: “…it’s much more important today than it was 24 hours ago. Because I spoke to David Perdue, what a great person, and Kelly Loeffler, two great people, but it was a setup. And I said, ‘We have no back line anymore.’ The only back line, the only line of demarcation, the only line that we have is the veto of the president of the United States.”

After more than an hour of listening to Trump, the crowd marched to the Capitol — without him — and we all watched what happened. The conservative movement was severely damaged by what many in that fired-up crowd did. At this writing, some conservative pundits are claiming that Antifa agitators donned MAGA hats, broke windows at the Capitol, and entered the building. Evidence for that so far is thin. One guy dressed up like a Viking or a Sioux Indian chief, had been photographed at Antifa riots last summer and again Wednesday among the crowd at the Capitol.

While it’s true that leftist riots perpetrated by Antifa and BLM over the summer were far worse than what happened at the Capitol, and it’s true those riots were not condemned by Democrats, that doesn’t excuse what happened Wednesday. Even if there were disguised Antifa rioters in the mob, they were outnumbered by Trump supporters from the rally at the White House. Terrible damage has been done to our cause. We can expect Democrats and the leftist media will exploit it for all it’s worth in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Trump owns what happened. His behavior was disgraceful and he should resign immediately. Will he though?

I doubt it.

THE FEAR IS WORSE THAN THE VIRUS

It’s not the problem; it’s how you react to it. So goes the aphorism and 2020 exemplifies it. All the sum-ups of the year past proclaimed that Covid-19 made it the worst year of the century, and maybe it was. If so, it wasn’t because of the virus; it was government reaction to it — shutting down virtually everything. Many now believe those shutdowns have caused more suffering and death than the virus has.

By the end of last year, evidence to support that contention multiplied, but not enough for big government or its mainstream media spokespeople to acknowledge it. Instead, they’ve doubled down on fear hype. Recent widespread testing indicates that perhaps half the population has already been infected and has immunity. While more deadly than the seasonal flu, chances of dying from Covid are extremely low. In September, the CDC reported that the under-69 population of those infected had more than a 99.5% chance of surviving it. So why the continued shutdowns? 

And, why do teachers’s unions insist that schools remain closed when the CDC reports that children aged 0-19 survive Covid at a rate of 99.997%? Surely it’s not to protect them. Why do blue-state governors and superintendents acquiesce? Teachers’s unions are among the party’s biggest contributors. After Tuesday’s Georgia elections, Democrats could control the entire federal government, but is our country uniting behind them? A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll demonstrates that although most Americans accept that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, 39% think the election was rigged. That points to a seriously divided country.

Is this division a recent phenomenon? Many of us first became aware of roiling discontent within the electorate when the Tea Party emerged ten years ago. Most agree it was a grassroots conservative movement, but I can recall what happened when a large contingent of Tea Party activists first made their presence known at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Republicans were wary because it had no leaders and wasn’t part of the Republican power structure. CPAC’s 3-day conference program that year didn’t even mention the Tea Party.

I remember walking into the hotel lobby in Washington and the first thing I noticed was a man dressed as an original 1773 Massachusetts patriot complete with tricorne hat and waving a yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. However no one mentioned the Tea Party in any of the sessions I attended. It was as if it didn’t exist. And Democrats were not going to welcome them either, given the Tea Party first coalesced following the narrow passage of government-expanding Obamacare in 2009 with not a single Republican vote.

Here was an amorphous throng of citizens dead-set against big government — and shunned by both major parties. Mitt Romney ignored the Tea Party in his 2012 presidential run and lost. Looking back now, we should not have been surprised that an outsider with zero political experience and promising to “drain the swamp” won the presidency in 2016. If it weren’t for his narcissism he would likely have won a second term. Instead, he was toppled by an aged career politician who stayed in his basement throughout the campaign in fear of either Covid or making a gaffe, or both.

After the first two weeks in early 2020, many Americans opposed government’s massive response to Covid. Shutting down the economy and triggering a near depression, it then created trillions of dollars out of thin air and distributed them to citizens, businesses, as well as various institutions and organizations large and small. Federal debt, already out of control, went into the stratosphere. Governors, most of them in blue states, extended shutdowns again and again, and now into 2021. All but 13 states have ordered their citizens to wear masks everywhere.

When gubernatorial authority to shut down states is challenged in court, judges have so far ruled it unconstitutional — even though states do have authority to deal with infectious disease. Anthony Fauci objects to that though, claiming that federalism is undermining the U.S. response he coordinates. Evidence that shutdowns at any level are effective in controlling spread is thin.

 According to an article in Just The News, when states report Covid statistics, nearly all conflate patients hospitalized “with Covid” and “due to Covid.” As more people are tested and found to have antibodies, it’s inevitable that more hospitalized patients will too. Hospitals are not being overfilled with patients “due to Covid” as media and government repeatedly proclaim, but “with Covid.” That’s an extremely important distinction that few Americans recognize.

Covid is a problem, yes, but it’s much worse when government and media stoke Covid fear to justify seizure of power over the day-to-day lives of Americans — and further dividing our country. Two centuries ago, President Andrew Jackson advised Americans: “Never take counsel of your fears,” yet that’s exactly what we’re doing.